Revolt of the Rats - Reed Blitzerman (early readers txt) 📗

a frame sparked his interest. He put the other films in the canister and saved this one out. He gathered the films together, resting thick arms across his knees. When sunrise bloomed a blazing orange, the eye once again regarding him with a baleful glare, Big Ev woke up Everett.

Everett knew what to do. He paused beside his parent’s bed. Only Father’s head was visible above the blankets. Everett watched him, unblinking. “Dad?” He placed his small hand inside his father’s. “Dad?” His father’s eyes twitched beneath their lids. “Father?”

Dad’s eyes appeared through slitted lids. “I’m awake.”

“Dad, I have something to show you.”

Dad held his hand as they descended the stairs. “Son, help with the chickens and cows and we’ll go.”

They left a note on the kitchen table, then chugged by tractor across the fields. The subject of Everett’s dreamland walk was at the edge of the property line. The spring seemed like nothing more than a large mud puddle, except for the fount in the center, where the water was in motion. Everett paced the ground along its edge, nodding his head.

His mother and aunt were on the porch when they returned. They went inside, put on a pot of coffee and ate around the wooden table. Then Everett started talking. Mom found some paper. As the plan became clear everyone joined in, except Dill.

Everett watched her. Her left hand traced an unconscious pattern on the table. She gazed out the front window, lingering on the Studebaker. Her head was still turned when she said, “You’re missing something.”

“Says who?”

Then Dill turned. “Says me. Look, you’re assuming everything will work.”

“It will!”

“I hope you’re right. But we all know now that bad things do happen.”

No one answered that.

“You’ve got to have a backup plan.” She took the paper from Judith and started writing. “So think about this....”

Work was where Carter felt safe. The bank was a monolith in the center of main street, a bunker. The clerk from reception came into his office, trailed by the Steiner family. Carter was seated behind his desk, when he glanced up and there was Eli Steiner. He froze as he detected the circular scars on Eli’s face.

“Good to see you, Carter.” Eli caught him in a handshake. “I understand there’s an issue with financing. Do you mind if we sit down?”

They took a seat around his desk, and Carter cleared this throat. “Eli, it is good to see you. Though you do seem...dissipated. As you know, a seed loan is serious business. Undertaken by those with the full ability to pay. Men and women with the ability to fulfill their obligations.”

Carter knew they were just empty words. To have his confidant come to ask for money left him sullen. Life, like banking, was a system of debts. And he knew who owed who when it came to Eli Steiner.

“You know me, Judith and Everett. This is Dill, her sister.”

“I see the resemblance.”

“The four of us are going to plant the harvest and then we’re going to bring it in, easy.”

“I’m not sure if I would call it that, Eli.”

“We’re experienced farmers, Carter.”

“As you know, times are hard, Eli. I need some sort of guarantee.” Inside he was nauseous. He felt disloyal.

“My word’s always been good enough before.”

“Well, times have changed, Eli and this is a bank after all. How about collateral? I believe your farm has quite a bit of equity.”

“It does, yes.”

“How about I loan you the money against the equity in your farm?” 

Carter had an involuntary thought. He imagined he’d turned the Steiners down for their loan. He’d soon be forced to foreclose on the farm. There’d be a Sheriff’s sale and then the man who had held his wife’s hand as she wept would be broken as well. He wished he’d never met Eli Steiner. He wished they’d been ignorant until their child had been born, blue and motionless.

“That’s still not enough,” Eli said. “We need more.”

”You need more for what? These are hard times, Eli. And as best I can tell you’re still a sick man.”

Eli smiled like his son that day on the boardwalk. He’d never seen the resemblance until now. “Gonna build a cistern.”

Everett placed a piece of paper on the desk.

“Well, this is just for lime and the like,” Carter said. “How are you going to build a cistern with that?”

“Marine concrete,” Everett piped up. “Just like they built the city of Alexandria with.” He beamed.

Carter wondered if his son would have been this alive, this vital.

Eli was unusually relaxed. His fingers traced the band of the hat in his lap. “And a machine shop.”

Carter said, “Work like that would cost more than what you’re asking for. It would take a healthy man and a full crew to do it,”

“Well no. We’re going to buy it from you. The auction for ‘Child’s Sheetmetal’ was a bust. The machines are still sitting in that building and on your balance sheet.”

“How can you hope to succeed where they failed? It’s not even your line of business.” Carter could almost follow his line of thought. I’ve underestimated this man.

“We’ll have no employees and no rent. We can put the whole thing in the barn. Judith ran the numbers.”

She pushed the slip of paper across his desk.

“I’ve got an engineer on staff already,” Eli said.

Dill nodded and took a note from her purse. “Here’s a list of the machines we’ll need.”

Carter picked up his phone to place a call. But stopped in mid stroke. There were all those loans that he had written that stood ready to default. He couldn’t stand to add another one to them. Not without another guarantee. Not even for Eli Steiner. He set the phone back down.

“You came and helped us when we lost the baby.” Carter was staring at the boy now, his envy hidden behind an impassive mask. The scarlet fever had killed their child, deforming his marriage into something part love and part regret.

“You surely did. Didn't even know he was stillborn till you said so. And your ideas do seem interesting, but that's still no guarantee that you'll be able to pay back the loan.”

Judith’s sister was downcast. She took a set of car keys out of her pocket, staring at them before, with a shaking hand, she placed them on the desk.

She said, “If you need more collateral, I’ve got a Studebaker Erskine worth a thousand dollars. You say the word, and it’s yours.”

He could tell she hoped he would turn her down. The way she held her breath you’d think that car was all she owned in the world. Carter picked up the keys. He leaned back in his chair and nodded once. “I will need to see your plan in writing, eventually.” And then he did pick up the phone.

“Please bring me the loan paperwork so we can get the Steiners on their way.”

They signed with his favorite fountain pen. Their goodbyes still hung in the air when they left for the lobby. Carter could see them just inside the front doors, outlined by the noonday sun.

Everett was in the center, their hands on his shoulders. Then one after the other they hugged him. Carter stared at the car keys to a Studebaker Erskine, praying it was a good luck charm. Maybe Ruby would try again.

The drive from the bank was quiet until Judith spoke. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“It needed to be done.” Dill turned to her sister then with her lips pursed, her mind already on to the next thing. “Besides, I got my heart set on something faster.”

Judith and Everett went to the feed store for materials. Eli and Dill went to the bank impound lot. They picked through the machines, selected a handful, and arranged their delivery.

Using the sketch Dill had created, they dug around the spring, getting themselves covered up to their necks in mud. When they were four feet down, everyone got out of the hole, and Dill took her measurements. They created wood forms onsite and poured their homemade marine concrete inside. When the cistern was complete, they started the irrigation paths to feed the bone-dry fields.

Everett walked the rows. By the Farmer’s Almanac in his head, half the planting season was gone. With the first batch of seeds in the ground, the rain stayed away. They planted more seeds and it stayed away the days after that. Every seed they had, they’d planted, and still, no rain fell.

Two weeks passed. Everett woke up as he always did, before sunrise, to a welcome thrumming on the roof. He dressed and trundled down the stairs, seeing the results of rain after the two-week drought. Everywhere the soil was cracked, baked hard by a thrifty sun, reluctant to accept visitors. The raindrops bounced off the surface like it was stone, except where they’d cut the irrigation paths.

His parents and Dill woke up and came down the stairs. The rain continued to pour. The cistern and the irrigation paths were filling, nourishing their small plants. It was the most successful harvest in the Steiner family history. But the price of corn fell to an all-time low.

Without the machine shop, they would have been ruined.

“Kata: a systematic process of teaching and training that emphasizes repetitive motion, executed in a disciplined way. It can be applied to individuals or groups. Typically used to describe the learning of form in martial arts.”

Author Unknown, “Production Methods in Small Lots for the Manager of Managers”